


Ease My Mind

by Bumblie_Bee



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Cannon suicide attempt, Connor gets better too but this isn't his story really, Deaf Character, Evan gets better, Friendship, Gen, Head Injury, Hurt Evan, Hurt/Comfort, but it gets better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:01:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27122887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bumblie_Bee/pseuds/Bumblie_Bee
Summary: Aphasia.It’s kind of ironic that’s the one word Evan thinks he could never forget. It’s kind of ironic it’s one of the few words he’s never going to hear, too.It makes it even worse that Evan knows both of those problems are entirely his own fault.
Relationships: Evan Hansen & Connor Murphy, Evan Hansen & Heidi Hansen, Evan Hansen & Jared Kleinman
Comments: 6
Kudos: 44





	Ease My Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, so, this fic involves a character dealing with both a serious head injury and subsequent hearing loss, and although I have tried to be sensitive with these issues, neither are subject areas I'm particularly familiar with. I'm also aware that hearing loss isn't really a thing people get from head injuries but it was vital to the plot so just roll with it. 
> 
> This story also deals with the aftermath of a suicide attempt and the mental health issues that surround that, but this is the Dear Evan Hansen fandom, so I think you're all probably aware of that. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

It’s Monday morning, the 3rd of September, and the first day of Senior year when Evan looks up to find his mom hovering in his bedroom doorway. She’s already dressed for work, her scrubs purple today and printed with tiny yellow butterflies, and her hair is tied up and her hoodie is on as it normally is when she’s just about to leave for the day. He expects her to wave him goodbye and dash off like she usually does when she sees him look up, but this time she doesn’t.

There’s a $20 bill in her hand he realises belatedly, and frustrated sort of grimace on her lips, and when she sees he’s looking, she tilts her head to the side and frowns at him in unspoken question.

That’s how she communicates with him now. Gesturing.

Well, that and writing. It’s just easier.

Evan huffs at her question, wishes he could answer with a gesture too.

“I wasn’t- um… wasn’t… I- I d-didn’t want… f-food,” he mutters in response, glaring at his cast rather than his mom and pulling at his shoelaces with the restless fingers of his good hand. He doesn’t hear his mom sigh as she crosses the room, but he’d imagine she would have done; she always used to when he told her things like that.

The conversations about the money left on the kitchen counter are not new; they’ve been happening a good year or so already, and before that there were ones about the phone, and shopping, and why he wouldn’t speak to anyone at school. Evan’s always been shy, but in recent years they’ve decided shy no longer quite describes his aversion to interacting with people and given him a diagnosis of social anxiety instead.

It was a diagnosis that had resulted in therapy sessions once every two weeks, and then medication when it became clear talking wasn’t even denting the surface of his problems.

Not that the Xanax has done much for him either.

The bed dips as his mom sits down beside him, and he tries not to flinch as she reaches out to touch his arm. There’s a dainty finger pointing at his laptop when he looks up again, and he forcibly withholds an eyeroll and obediently opens a new word document. His hand shakes a little as he passes the computer over to his mom so she can type the once verbal lecture he knows she is going to give.

She frowns at the screen as she types, and Evan picks at his shoes with agitated fingers and frowns at the well-worn keyboard gathering dust in the corner of his bedroom as he waits.

_Evan frowned at the dusty path as he made his way through the forest, his well-worn hiking boots heavy with hopelessness and exhaustion against the cracked ground. The morning had started like most, with his mom heading for work before he was up, and him finding money on the kitchen counter rather than food in the fridge._

_As usual, the bus had been loud and crowded, and as it often did, it met traffic outside the Walmart on Elm Street leaving him running from his stop to the park because arriving sweaty and out of breath was slightly better for his anxiety than being late. But then, when he’d got to work and calmed his breathing enough to leave the cloakroom to check the job assignment board for the day, he found he’d been stationed guarding the entrance to a path which passed a half fallen tree rather than patrolling the deeper paths like he usually did._

_He’d had to retreat into the cloakroom for another session of trying to force his lungs back into a normal sort of rhythm after that, but eventually had made it to his assigned post for the day._

_Mid way through a morning of awkwardly explaining the path closure and stuttering through arguments with the few visitors who did not seem to understand the problem with walking under precariously propped up trees, his phone had dinged in his pocket, and when he checked, it, he’d found a text from his mom. Which, well, it wasn’t like he had been expecting it to be anyone else, but that still would have been nice. It would have been nice if the text hadn’t told him his mom was staying late at work, too, and hadn’t been followed by another asking if he could find a lift home from a friend._

_A friend. Ha._

_Two hours later, that text, that last domino, had still been playing through his mind when another Junior Ranger came to relieve him of his duties._

_He’d thanked the kid, only stuttering a little, and then, instead of heading back towards the busy Hell that was the café like he was expected to during his breaks, he headed deeper into the forest towards his tree where he usually ate his lunch._

High school is Hell.

It has been since the first first day three years ago. 

It’s even worse now; Evan decides so instantly as he skirts the lockers, staying close to the side with his casted arm held protectively against his stomach, and keeps an eye on the ever-growing crowd of his post-holiday excited peers. 

Well, excited might not be the right word for it, he decides as he makes his way further into the school, but they’re certainly energetic and rowdy as they greet friends and classmates they haven’t seen much of during the summer off. 

They’re all awfully loud, too. Even he can tell so.

Sounds to him are muted and muffled, the words he hears warped as though underwater. It leaves the shouts and yells and excited chatter of the student body sounding more like garbled background noise than anything else, but he can still hear it.

He isn’t completely deaf.

Just deaf enough for his ears to be deemed entirely useless.

It isn’t even due to his hearing, or lack thereof, that he doesn’t notice Alana until he walks into her; she’s moving much quicker than anyone else is, walking down the packed corridor with an eager determination and a too wide grin on her lips. Eyes bright, she says something to Evan when she catches her balance, maybe asking about his summer like she habitually asks everyone on their first day back, but before he’s had time to even consider what to do about the fact he doesn’t know for sure what she’s said, her lips are moving again.

They move for a while, excitedly relaying to him the likely pre-planned speech about her summer she tends to have, before suddenly she’s patting him on the shoulder and trotting off to present her probably impressive break to someone else.

Evan thinks he might be left with whiplash from the encounter as he watches her walk away.

_The other Junior Ranger paid him little attention as he walked away in the wrong direction, and the pair of young hikers in the forest didn’t seem to notice as he turned right off the path at a half dead pine and took himself deeper into the trees. There was no one around to care when he expertly pulled himself up into the branches into the tallest tree in Ellison State Park, although, normally, that was how Evan liked it best._

_Once settled on a branch much higher than he would usually dare, he swung a leg idly over the too distant ground, his breathing heavy with exertion and his thoughts heavier. He leant back against the trunk as he considered how high he had almost inadvertently climbed, how precarious his position, how easy it would be for him to slip and fall and how no one would probably notice if he did. He sat there a while, wondered how long it would take for someone to notice if he didn’t return from the forest, wondered how long it would take even his mom._

_She was busy, always busy, trying to work and learn and bring up a failure of a human simultaneously, and he considered that for a long time, considered his effect on that. His mind was racing as he looked down at the pine needle littered ground so very far below his boot, as he considered the burden he is, and was, and always would be, and thought about just how much easier for her it would be if he fell._

_How much easier it would be for him, too._

_Life was exhausting, after all. Life, and his crippling anxiety, and the effort he had to put into even getting out of bed each day, and the struggle of ignoring the lonely ache in his heart._

_It would be easier for him, easier for her, and there was no one else who was aware enough of his existence to care._

_It wasn’t long after that that surprisingly steady hands loosed enough on the branch to slip free._

Evan startles at the hand on his shoulder, and the heavy biology textbook slips from his twitchy fingers. It lands on the bottom of his locker with a bang that reverberates through the metal to the door resting against his arm. The spare bottles of Tylenol and Xanax and another painkiller he hasn’t bothered to put the effort into fully reading the name of topple, skittering out of the locker as Evan flinches violently round.

Beside him, Jared laughs.

He usually does when he makes Evan jump, thinks it’s funny to see how much he can startle him like it’s some sort of a joke.

Evan doesn’t find it funny. He never has and he doesn’t think he ever will. It just leaves him feeling tense and more on edge than usual as though he’s a character in a particularly shitty scary movie.

It’s probably worse for Jared to do that now; it must be morally wrong to startle people just because you know they can’t hear you approach.

And Jared does know that. He’s likely the only other student at school who does. He’s certainly the only student who knows about what happened to Evan over the summer. Well, knows as much as anyone does, anyway.

There had been an afternoon spent together at Evan’s house during the time between him leaving the hospital and the start of school, both of them sitting side by side on the couch playing endless rounds of Mario Kart on Evan’s dated Wii despite his nastily broken wrist. It had hurt, but not as much as the knowledge that in the kitchen, his mom had been discussing him with Janet Kleinman as they’d gamed.

Half of him had wanted to think they were talking in hushed voices like they normally would be when they discussed the things they didn’t want him to overhear, but from Jared’s frequent glances towards the open doorway and badly contained curiosity readable on his expression, he’d guessed they weren’t. 

“W-what they are … um- what?” Evan had asked eventually what he thought was quietly. Beside him, Jared had winced at his mess of a sentence and then awkwardly shrugged as though he hadn’t been able to hear every word they were saying. Evan, his cheeks burning, had turned back to the TV and tried to focus on the too bright screen through the tears blurring his vision. He hadn’t tried to say anything else to Jared that afternoon, and although he knows his speech has improved since then, he hasn’t tried to speak to him since either.

Evan shakes the thought from his brain, shoots Jared a disapproving glare that just earns him a laugh.

The laugh has dried up by the time Evan has collected his belongings and reassembled his locker, and then after the faint click of the metal door closing, it’s entirely silent between them. Almost awkward. _Definitely_ awkward. Jared clearly doesn’t know what to say or do. Had things been normal, he’d probably have boasted about the Camp Evan knows he went to over the summer, told him about the friends he’d made and the games he’d won and the girls he’d kissed in a broom cupboard.

He doesn’t, though. Evan wouldn’t be able to follow if he did.

A second later, his eyes light and his head whips to the side, and when Evan follows, he finds himself gazing at the tall, intimidatingly darkly dressed form of Connor Murphy.

Beside him, Jared is smirking broadly and saying something Connor doesn’t appear to be all too pleased about.

He’s clearly angry as he steps forward and says something back, that much Evan can tell even though the words are lost on him. Jared’s words are lost too, but the nervousness of them and the laugh they’re enveloped in isn’t, and Evan can see he looks a little scared as he walks away. Confused and anxious, Evan looks back from his rapidly retreating friend to the boy he has angered in the corridor. He doesn’t know what has happened, or what has been said, but it can’t have been nice.

Makes sense, really. Jared often isn’t very nice.

Across the hallway, Connor says something. It’s loud enough that Evan can just about hear the abrasiveness of his tone above the quiet garbled hum of the slowly emptying corridor even though the words themselves are indistinguishable.

Not knowing what to do, he just stands and stares, his mouth a little open as he tries to work out how to explain to the terrifyingly angry boy that he hasn’t got a clue what he’s saying, until his chance to say anything at all is lost.

Evan flinches back when Connor yells again, and inadvertently lets out a stressed little bubble of noise that just seems to anger Connor more. There’s more unintelligible yelling, the vibrations of heavy boots through the floor as Connor approaches, and then suddenly Connor’s hands are on his shoulders, roughly pushing him aside as he flees.

Evan ends up on the floor.

His arm hurts.

It’s achingly familiar.

_Evan found himself waking alone beneath a tree with an aching head and a burning sort of throb in his wrist, and for a brief moment, he had absolutely no idea what had happened. It was only a second later that the physical hurt was joined by an agony in his heart when the memories of how he’d got to where he was sluggishly reassembled themselves and a sob of panic and despair broke free from his lungs._

_With his chest burning and his head spinning, he cried for the pain and he cried for what he’d done and he cried for his failure, and then then nauseous and hurting and not daring to move, he lay on the dry midsummer grass and through teary eyes, stared at a green world that was warped and blurry and gut wrenchingly empty as he waited for someone to come._

Evan doesn’t know how long he stays on the floor, but when he looks up, Zoe Murphy is there. She says something to him, offers her hand, and Evan just stares stupidly at it for a second and then shakily pushes himself to his feet and flees.

There’d been a time when he’d have given anything for a chance to speak to her, when he’d gone to the Jaz band’s concerts to watch her play and considered lingering outside rehearsals so he could bump into her just as she’d left. He’d never found the courage to speak to her, and he doesn’t think he’d have been very good at it even if he had.

Hell, even today he could have taken her hand and let her help him up from the floor, shaken it as he’d explained he couldn’t hear what it was she was saying, told her it was fine when she apologised because that’s what people do when they meet him now. He hadn’t done that though, he’d ran.

He’s always struggled with conversation, felt like he was outside the general population even when he’d been able to hear what they were saying to him. Now, he feels more of an outsider than ever. Sound is lost on him and words are garbled and indistinct. It’s as though he’s watching life continue through a window, and it makes him feel more alone than ever.

_Evan didn’t know how long passed before he realised that no one was coming, and he didn’t know how long he lay on the forest floor after that, but eventually, he blinked the tears from his eyes and swallowed back the rising nausea and forced himself to his feet. His arm throbbed at the effort, and his head pounded, and he ended up leaning heavily against the trunk of the tree as he waited for his balance to return and his vision to clear and his stomach to settle. Everything felt wrong and warped and painful and much too much and a fresh wave of tears welled then overflowed to calve a new trail down his already salt stained cheeks._

Just as before on days when the cafeteria is much too much to deal with, Evan goes to the computer room at lunch, and feeling worn and frayed and close to tears and with nothing better to do, he opens his laptop intending to finish the letter he told his mom he had already finished. The throbber spins as the old laptop boots, going around and around and around like his thoughts as he considers the waste of a day he’s had so far.

Evan’s not surprised in the slightest to have learnt that going to class is almost completely pointless now that he can’t hear what the teachers say. He doesn’t think anyone would be, but no one had known what else to do with him other than send him back to school and hope for the best. He’s in his senior year, it would be more disruptive to move him now, they’d agreed.

Besides, no one knows for sure how much he’s going to recover yet. He’s still healing, his mom insists when he gets angry about the hearing loss or aphasia or the tremors that still plague his right hand, and he knows she’s kind of right. When he’d first woken back in the hospital he’d struggled to read or write or stand and had barely been able to string two words together, so he’s come pretty far considering that wasn’t all that long ago. It’s just that he’s still got longer to go to get back to normal than he thinks he’s going to manage.

There’s a buzzing in his pocket and a text on his phone when he checks it. It’s from his mom, and just as he expects, it’s informing him that she’s stuck at work and asking if he could get the bus to therapy. Another one follows, the phone buzzing in his hand as he holds it, telling him she won’t be home for dinner that night either as she’s going straight to class. A third says there are Trader Joe dumplings in the freezer if he wants them.

He doesn’t.

For a long while, Evan looks at the messages, and then types out a shaky ‘okay’. Even he isn’t sure what he’s agreeing to, but she can take it to mean what she wants.

The phone is still in his hand when it vibrates again, very likely signalling a reply from his mom since no one else is interested enough in his life to want to text him, and checking it just confirms that.

He doesn’t reply to her text this time, leaving her message asking if he’s printed the letter for therapy and if he’s had a good day unanswered.

It’s a stupid question, though. It doesn’t deserve an answer.

Or maybe it deserves a stupid answer; that’s how the saying goes.

Instead of replying, he types his anger into the letter he told his mom he’d already finished. His shaky, uncoordinated fingers depresses the laptop keys with much more force than is needed as he writes about a hopelessness that has been there for as long as he can remember, and a growing frustration with his now more broken than ever brain, and a new-born fury with himself for making his shitty, shitty life so much worse.

He writes about his mourning for music, his grief over a keyboard sitting in his bedroom which he can no longer play, a collection of sheet music and CD’s that now mean nothing to him. He writes about his loneliness too, and about how no one would notice if he did disappear tomorrow, how it would be so much better, so much easier for everyone if he did.

He presses print.

Silently slams his laptop shut.

Closes his eyes and tries to hold the burning of tears behind his lids.

_Eventually, his tears dried up, his mind and body drained and exhausted, and soon after that he gave up waiting. He reasoned through his pain and upset that the nausea and disorientation and the weird buzzing in his aching brain were the results of a concussion and were therefore unlikely to pass however long he waited._

_It was as he started the long, tiring limp back through the forest to the Rangers’ Hut by the gates that he realised he still probably would have had more success waiting for his concussion to heal than someone, anyone, to find him._

A voice startles him.

It’s loud enough that in the quiet of the computer room, the words are almost audible.

Turning towards the sound, Evan opens salty eyes to find Connor Murphy standing a little way across the room wearing all black and a twisted sort of expression Evan can’t quite read.

It isn’t anger, though. Not this time.

Uncertainty? Confusion, maybe.

He says something else, and indicates at Evan. At the cast on his broken left arm.

Evan still doesn’t know what he’s saying.

He holds up a hand points to his ears and urgently shakes his head, all while watching Connor through wide, worried eyes and hoping to a God he doesn’t quite believe in any more that he isn’t going to end up on the wrong side of his anger all over again.

Just telling Connor that he can’t hear would be more effective, he knows, but somehow, the fear of making a fool of himself trying to speak far outweighs the fear of another push. He’s always hated speaking, hated his stutter and how his voice always seemed to come out too high and raspy and fast with panic, and now it’s worse than ever. Not only is there the aphasia to deal with too now, but the fact that he can no longer hear himself. He can’t tell what he sounds like, has no idea how loud he’s talking. He could be yelling or whispering and he wouldn’t know at all.

Despite his fear, Connor doesn’t advance this time, doesn’t come over to shove him again, just stares at him for a moment, his expression caught somewhere between confusion and distrustful anger, and then, rather abruptly, he says something else Evan can only catch the harsh tone of.

He shrugs helplessly in response, eyes sill wide and a little alarmed.

A second passes, Connors gaze boring deep, analysing, as though he can’t quite work out if Evan is messing with him or not, and then, just when Evan thinks he might be about to disintegrate under the intensity of his stare, Connor’s expression softens and he reaches into his bag and pulls out a notebook.

‘That’s new’ he holds up in a spidery sort of scrawl.

Evan nods, not knowing what else to do.

The pen returns to the page.

‘What happened?’

Evan frowns at it for a second then shakes his head and looks down at his shoes.

He doesn’t know what to say.

_Evan didn’t know much of anything when he stumbled into the Rangers’ Hut, but he knew he didn’t feel very well at all. His vision was blurry, and his head was pounding in fierce competition with his throbbing left arm, and when Head Ranger Tom spoke, Evan wasn’t able to tell what he had said. He frowned at the garbled sort of sound, confused and in pain, and then vomited onto the floor._

_Seconds later, and with Tom suddenly at his side, his hand on Evan’s upper arm, his expression slackened, and his limbs stiffened, and his pinched blue eyes rolled back into his head._

‘No one’s signed your cast?’ the notebook reads when Connor prods it against his arm.

Evan startles from his memories, frowns at the words on notebook, then at Connor as he holds up his biro.

It’s an unspoken question easy to understand, and a question he could easily answer by passing over the Sharpie his mom had given him that morning, but it isn’t one he’s sure he wants to. He can’t quite tell if Connor is mocking him or not. Something makes Evan think he isn’t, although his warped view of the world is now even more distorted than ever, and he really can’t be certain. Connor doesn’t back down, though, just frowns at him, and so uncertainty, reluctantly, he passes over the marker in his pocket.

Connor takes it, takes his cast too, and judging by the alarmed expression he’s pulling as his head snaps back up, Evan thinks a wince he couldn’t quite contain had slipped from his lips. Secretly, he isn’t all that sure why Connor looks surprised by it; casts typically encase sore and broken limbs and therefore should be handled with care, but his isn’t going to complain.

He isn’t going to complain when he looks down to find Connor’s name on his cast in too bold, too large letters, but he knows his eyes had widened almost comically at the sight of it.

He’s still staring when Connor says something else, and although he can’t quite understand the garbled words, he can hear the bitter sort of tone they are spoken in.

Connor doesn’t write down whatever it was he said when Evan looks up with a questioning frown, Instead he smiles a little awkwardly, and then, almost as an afterthought, raises his eyebrows and a finger and holds out the piece of paper he’s had trapped under his arm. It’s plain white, no lines like the sheets in a notebook, and the writing on it is typed rather than handwritten.

Evan’s breathing catches and his eyes widen when he realises what it is he’s being passed.

He finds himself praying that Connor hasn’t read the letter he’s just brought him.

It isn’t a letter he wants anyone to read ever because not only does it contain his most private inner thoughts, he’s pretty sure it’s also the sort of letter that would have his mom crying and his therapist frowning in concern and his doctors escorting him to an inpatient mental health facility.

Connor gives him a funny sort of look as he catches his eye, one that Evan can’t quite decode the meaning behind and then says a few more words he doesn’t catch. He doesn’t wait for a reply, or for Evan to frown in confusion because that’s how conversations with him work now, just picks his bag from the floor, puts his notebook back inside, and then heads from the room.

He waves as he leaves, an awkward sort of flick of the hand passed without much of a smile, and Evan finds himself staring at the doorway long after he has gone, wondering what on earth just happened.

_When Evan woke, he found himself looking through bleary eyes at the chipped paint of the kitchen doorway in the ranger’s hut. The floor was uncomfortably hard beneath his shoulder and hip, but when he tried to sit, he found his head throbbing awfully enough that he’d have stilled even without the hands on his arm gently but firmly holding him down. A voice came, one that was panicked and pained warped enough that it took Evan a while to realise it was his own, and then Tom’s worried face swan into view._

_Evan frowned at it, wondering why Tom was worried, Tom was never worried, and then pressed his eyes closed against the light. Just before his limbs stiffened and his grip on consciousness slipped again, he thought he could hear another voice, one deeper than his own, Tom’s, he reasoned, telling him to hold on, that help would be there soon._

That afternoon, whilst waiting for the bus, Evan finds himself sitting in one of the music practise rooms. He has no real reason to be there, not now, but habits formed over years of school apparently weren’t going to be broken quite as easily as his brain. The practise rooms had become his haven over the past three years, a shelter containing solitude and music and, in his favourite, a piano he could play in place of the keyboard he used at home. It was a good day if he got the room with the piano; there’s so much more authenticity in the tone of it than the keyboard, and something right about feeling the vibration of the hammer hitting the strings beneath his fingertips, too.

Years back, when he had been small, there had been a piano at home, too. Just like the one at school, that one that was old and battered, the wood tired and the varnish scratched and the plastic surface of the keys beginning to peal in places, but that hadn’t mattered. It wasn’t as though he had been old enough to care for anything other than the music his father’s hands made as they skimmed over the keys. It had been like magic to him, some sort of wizardry.

When he got older, he had played beside his father, his tiny fingers clumsy with youth and much too short to play the proper chords, but he’d loved that he could make such sounds all the same.

It was the one way in which he ever connected to his father, too, although he isn’t all that sure how he feels about that now.

Lots of things had changed that February day when his dad returned home in a U-haul truck and took his clothes from the cupboard and the couch from the lounge and the piano from the dining room where it had always sat, and seven-year-old Evan’s piano playing had been one of them.

He hadn’t cared at the time, much too preoccupied with his father’s disappearance and the terror that his mom was going to follow suit, but then, as the upset and worry settled to a background ache and he realised the piano would not be as easily replaced as the couch, he’d begun to miss it.

His mom had bought him a keyboard for his ninth birthday and although it hadn’t been quite the same, the tone of the music robotic and a little warped and the keys spongy and vibrationless, he’d known it was as close a replacement as she could manage. He’d been thrilled with it at the time, ended up crying when he unwrapped it and appreciated it more than any other gift, but he’d still considered the piano in the practise room at the end of the music corridor a goldmine all the same.

It was authentic, and its home soon became his haven.

He’d missed it over the summer, missed playing it, until what happened had happened and there was suddenly something more important to miss from his life. 

Evan closes his eyes, holds down three keys. The hammers hit, he knows so; he can still feel the vibrations beneath his fingertips as he presses the keys in a way he can’t with his keyboard keys back home, but he still can’t really hear the chord they play. In place of music, there’s still just a quiet, garbled sort of noise that makes his heart ache and his throat tighten and anger cloud his thoughts. 

Frustrated and upset, he stabs at the keys again, pressing them harder, and harder and harder because he just wants to hear them, until he’s nearly crying at the din he knows he’s making but cannot truly hear.

_Evan woke again to find his head pounding and his arm throbbing and a raw scratchiness in his throat. It hurt, h_ e _hurt, and a sob of pain bubbled from inside him. It caught in his rough throat, turning to wet, upset coughs as it escaped his mouth. A hand arrived then and cupped his cheek, the thumb running soothingly over his tear-sticky skin, and when his eyes fluttered open, he found his mom leaning over him, tears in her own eyes and words of comfort silent on her lips._

_Confused and in pain and with his breaths choppy and his heart racing in his chest, he tried to ask her where he was and what had happened, but a stinging coldness in his arm came and pulled him back to sleep before he could even begin to question where her voice had gone._

He sees more than hears the door fly open behind him, catches the movement out of the corner of his eye, and flinches round to see Connor shouting something at him from the doorway. On his pale face is a manic sort of expression Evan quite doesn’t fully understand. He looks a little too angry, a little too upset, for his emotions to be purely caused by poorly played music, but Evan could be wrong. He’s never been good at reading people, and now he has even less of a chance than ever.

The intense, furious expression holds for a moment and then falls, and Connor’s pale cheeks flush a little as though maybe he realises he’s been yelling at a deaf kid.

A deaf kid who he’s just found crying as he abuses a piano he can’t hear.

Evan looks down, his own cheeks hot, and awkwardly wipes away tears he hadn’t realised he’d shed with the palm of his good hand. He’s should probably apologise he realises after a moment, suddenly aware what he had been doing would have been awfully loud to anyone who had a brain that worked properly even through the soundproof double door system of the music rooms.

‘Sorry,’ he mouths instead, still not quite looking Connor in the eye. They’re mismatched in colour, the right blue, the left half blue, half brown, he notices as he waits for Connor to take the apology and leave, and kind of empty looking without all the anger burning inside them. 

Connor doesn’t leave like Evan wants him to, doesn’t go to find someone else to yell at, maybe someone who can actually hear him this time, and let Evan go back to wallowing in his own muffled misery. Instead he shakes his head at the apology, tilts it in thought for a moment, and then steps into the room. The door closes silently behind him, but Evan feels the thud as he dumps his heavy satchel down on the floor before it. Confused and a little wary, he watches as Connor sits himself up on the deep windowsill, and then opens his mouth to say something. He closes it again seconds later and reaches into his bag for his notepad and pen.

Evan’s hand shakes as he takes the piece of paper Connor holds out for him moments later.

‘Any reason you were murdering that piano?’

Stunned, he involuntarily coughs out a wet, phlegmy sort of laugh, and then, still entirely unsure as to what is happening and how to reply, he turns around and gives the piano a half-hearted sort of pat. An apology of sorts.

Connor’s lip twitches. He rolls his eyes a little and returns his pen to his notebook.

‘Can you actually play, or do you just, you know, take your anger out on them?’

Evan finds a small, awkward smile on his own lips as he nods once, then tilts his head in a way he hopes Connor might be able to understand.

‘You play, or you’re angry?’

Evan grimaces. He wants to say both, but he doesn’t know how without words, so he turns around and plays a one handed C major scale instead. The keys depress smoothly beneath his fingers and he feels the vibrations as the hammers strike the wires, but what he hears couldn’t be described as a scale at all. It’s just noise. Quiet and garbled.

Connor doesn’t seem all that impressed either.

‘Even I can play a C scale,’ he writes, and when Evan looks back up from the note, he finds Connor’s head is tilted to the side and his eyes are flashing a little brighter than they were before. There’s something about his expression that makes Evan think he might almost be challenging him.

He rolls his eyes theatrically, turns back to the piano, thinks of a song. Tentatively, he places his hands on the keys.

It’s unbelievably weird playing through memory with no real sound or tune beside the one he’s following inside his head, and more than a little unnerving not knowing well he’s playing. He can’t hear if he hits any keys too hard or wrongly presses any notes, but if he does, he blames it on his cast rather than his shaky right hand. He can feel the keys depress beneath his fingers though, feel the vibration through his skin, and he focuses on that and on the fact for once, he has an audience of sorts.

It’s an audience he doesn’t think is going to judge if he does hit a note wrong, too, so that’s nice. 

He doesn’t play for long, doesn’t think there’s much point as he can’t hear it and Connor probably doesn’t want to, but when he turns back after finishing, he finds a smile of sorts on Connor’s pale lips and impressed bowing of his brow.

He huffs a little laugh and reaches out to take the pad of paper from Connor’s limp grip. 

‘Believe me now?’ he writes, holding it up with a shyly raised brow.

Connor opens his mouth, closes it again, then bobs his head once and reaches out for his paper.

‘You’re really good,’ he’s scrawled, and then underneath ‘how long have you been playing for?’

A flush forms on Evan’s cheeks at the praise and he shrugs, cocks his head, and then holds up five fingers. He tries to twist his expression into one that suggests he might have started playing around then.

‘5 years?’

A shake of his head.

‘Since you were five’ he guesses again.

This time, Evan nods.

‘That’s really young! You’re like Mozart, he played when he as young, didn’t he?’

Evan scoffs and shakes his head because he really isn’t. He’s good sure, talented, maybe, but not any better than the average musically adept 17 year old who’s enjoyed playing since they were small.

He points to the pad, smiles as he accepts it.

‘Do you play anything?’

Connor scoffs at that. 

‘Hah no’ he writes when Evan passes him the pad. There’s a pause, and then he’s writing again. ‘Well, I played drums for a bit in middle school but more because mom thought it could be a good way for me to let my anger out. Hitting drums is more socially acceptable than hitting people, apparently.’

Evan looks up, catches his eye. He doesn’t think Connor’s lying about that. He doesn’t look like he is, and he certainly has a reputation for violence around the school. Rumour has it he gave Brian Mildred a concussion last spring for looking at him funny in the toilets, although Evan isn’t all that sure he believes it to be true.

He isn’t all that sure he’d find it as amusing as it had seemed back then either.

It hits just a little too close to home.

_When Evan woke, he knew it wasn’t his own bed he was in. The lights above him were too harsh behind his eyelids, and the air was still and sterile, and the mattress was plasticky and much too hard to be his own. Through the molasses in his achy brain, he idly wondered where he was and what had happened, but thinking hurt too much for him to really try, and he found he was much too tired to find the energy to care all that much anyway. Seconds later, just as a hand found his face, fingers light against his cheek, darkness lazily engulfed the white and unconsciousness stole him again._

There’s a tap on his side, a light kick of a scuffed leather boot drawing him back, and when he looks over, there’s a frown on Connor’s lips. Concern; Evan can read that one easily.

‘did you play them long?’ he forces himself to ask. Not that he needs to force himself to talk to Connor, but sometimes he does need encouragement to stay present in the real world. It isn’t a new thing, he’s always been away with the fairies as his mom called it, but it is harder to stay out of his head now than it was before.

He supposes there’s less to draw him out than there used to be.

Connor tilts his head at the question, flick up eyes that are still a little worried, but then does take the book and write back his answer.

‘two months maybe?’ He shrugs joltily as he holds it out, makes it clear he doesn’t really know the answer for sure. Its fair enough, really, Evan knows how long ago middle school was, especially through the see of high school memories. He tries not to dwell on those.

‘Not your thing?’ he asks instead, tilting his head curiously as he passes back the book.

Connor reads the note and smirks, huffs out an amused breath that Evan can’t hear but can see in the movement of the hair that hangs around his face. The mischievous grin holds as he scribbles out, ‘Not really, but it wasn’t my choice to quit. Fucking Larry said I was disrupting the peace of the neighbourhood’

Evan smiles at that; it’s a joke, he knows, and then his grin widens into something more genuine when he reads the sentence added below.

‘like it was disrupting the peace of the neighbourhood but only because he was in it. He was pretty pissed when he figured out I only practiced when he was around.’

Their eyes catch, and Evan thinks there’s a little more life in them than there was before. He holds his hand out of the notebook, considers his question briefly.

‘How much effort did you put into this practising?’ he asks, one eyebrow raised pointedly.

Connor chuckles silently. ‘Oh, loads. I really went for it, you know. Snapped a few drumsticks but you’ve got to put that effort in to get good.’

When Evan looks up from the note, Connor’s expression is tight with faux determination and his hand is fisted in fake enthusiasm. He can’t help but laugh and then nods seriously in agreement. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and all that.’

Connor reads the note as he reaches out for the paper, a grin still on his lips, but then a thought crosses Evan’s mind and he takes the book back just before Connor takes hold.

He frowns, holds up a finger as he writes.

‘Wait, who is Larry?’ he asks. ‘Larry’ isn’t exactly what Connor had called whoever it was he’s talking about, but it’s close enough considering Evan doesn’t have anything against this person himself just yet. He wonders if it’s a third, older Murphy sibling Connor insists on tormenting, or if he has a grudge against a neighbour, or if it’s a step-parent he just doesn’t get along with.

Evan would understand that perfectly.

The smirk is back as Connor reads his question and it stays put as he takes the book back and writes his reply.

It doesn’t take long.

‘My dad’

Evan knows his eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline when he reads that, and a startled sort of laugh bubbles up from inside him. Connor’s smirk shifts to a grin that’s genuine wide enough to crinkle the skin beside his eyes and give Evan a flash of perfect, white teeth. It takes Evan a moment to realise Connor’s smiling at him. At his laughter, and not in a bad way.

Evan doesn’t think that has happened for a long while.

‘Music isn’t really my thing anyway. I like to draw.’ Connor adds, when Evan’s finally got himself and his breathing back under control.

His eyes widen at that revelation. It’s unexpected. ‘Draw what?’

Connor purses his lips, shrugs in a way Evan think might mean ‘whatever’.

‘Show me?’

A hair ruffing scoff and a head shake make as clear an answer as any.

Evan pouts. ‘I showed you.’ He raises an eyebrow pointedly, and a second later Connor huffs and takes the notebook back. Evan watches him as his flicks back through the pages of their conversations until he finds something he wants to show.

He bookmarks it with his finger, writes ‘It’s pretty shitty, don’t judge’, and then flips the page back and passes Evan the book.

The drawing on the open page is of a squirrel, one perched on a tree stump, sat back on its hind legs as it nibbles at an acorn. It’s all done in pencil, shaded in tones of grey, but it looks unbelievably realistic all the same. Evan runs his finger gently over the smooth graphite covering the surface of the paper. He wishes he could tell Connor how good it was whilst still having the page open to look at it.

He doesn’t turn the page to write a message for a good while, spends as long as he thinks he can before its weird searching out the details and trying to commit the picture to memory, and then turns back to their conversation.

‘That’s amazing!!!’ he writes, ‘It looks so real!!!’

Connor’s flushing a little when he looks up. He shrugs his shoulders just as Evan had done when Connor had complimented him on his piano playing and takes his book back.

‘I mean, I drew it from a photo I took so it’s kind of cheating.’

Evan stares at the words for a moment, wondering how Connor has come to that conclusion, and then sighs.

‘Disappointing.’ He writes, and then underneath. ‘I’m expecting you to get the squirrel to pose for you next time. 4/10.’

Connor reads, eyes skimming over the paper, and then just when Evan’s wondering if his joke has gone too far, he leans his head back against the window and laughs. It brightens his eyes, lightly wrinkles the skin beside them, shakes his chest as the amusement bubbles silently from his lungs.

Or, well, not silently, really. 

He isn’t laughing silently to anyone but Evan, and it’s then that Evan realises that although he knows Connor is laughing, he actually has no idea what that sounds like. 

He’s heard Connor speak before, angrily snapping at peers or teachers or monotonously reading from a book in class, but he’s never heard him laugh, and so unlike how it is with his mom or Jared or even Doctor Sherman, Evan has no way of even guessing what it sounds like.

All of a sudden, he feels inexplicably sad, and he glances down at his twitchy, restless hands because he isn’t sure he could keep looking at Connor and not end up crying and he really doesn’t want to end up crying. That would not be a reasonable or sane response to laughter.

Although, really, Evan isn’t sure he trusts his brain to be reasonable or sane anymore.

He doesn’t think he should have trusted it before the fall either, looking back.

Clearly something was already wrong with it if he thought he could solve his problems by jumping out of a fucking tree.

_When Evan woke, he woke with a sense of déjà vu and the feeling that something was wrong. The lights above him were too bright even with his eyes closed, and his head was achy, throbbing dully deep inside, and his limbs felt heavy and numb and like they didn’t want to move even if he could find the effort to try. There was a tickle blowing against his nose, too, and Evan didn’t understand that at all._

_Irritated by the breeze, his nose ruffled involuntarily, but when he sluggishly reached a leaden hand up to bat whatever was causing it away, another hand, one soft and small and distantly familiar, gently but firmly took his own and held it back from his face._ _He fought it weakly in protest, awfully confused but much too tired to be truly concerned, but then the grip shifted, that hand moving so as to hold his own, and a thumb started running soothingly over his knuckles._

S _luggishly, he fluttered heavy eyes to investigate, and squinting against the brightness, he found his mom beside him, her blurry face pale against the whitewashed wall behind her. She looked tired, he realised, and sad despite the smile she was wearing. Her eyes red and puffy and bruised from fatigue, but before he could even find the words to tell her to sleep, he found his vision fading as exhaustion and something else drew him back to unconsciousness._

He ends up glaring at his cast instead of crying, finds his eyes drawn to the black sharpie scribbled on the once pristine fibreglass. The C is on the back of his hand, the O over his wrist in place of his watch, and the first N just over where he knows the fractures to be. The name stretches on until it ends with the R up by Evan’s elbow, the letter big and bold and unmissable and filling the cast entirely.

Not that that matters, it isn’t like Evan has anyone else who would want to sign it.

Even Jared hasn’t, and Evan had been counting on him.

He doesn’t really know what to make of Connor signing it, if he’s honest, and he doesn’t really know what to make of Connor sitting with him now, but it clearly isn’t just out of pity as he’s seen Connor smile more in the past few however many minutes than he has since they started school together eleven years ago.

That might be an exaggeration; it isn’t like he’s been counting, but Connor certainly looks happier now than Evan has seen him look since they started high school, that’s for sure.

Connor doesn’t look quite so happy now, there’s a frown on his lips again. Concern.

Evan understands why, tries to smile, but Connor’s frown deepens at that into something more puzzled and he goes to put the pen to the paper, to ask him if he’s okay, maybe, or what’s wrong, or why he’s such a freak that he keeps spacing out mid conversation, but then the moment is broken by Evan’s phone buzzing against his thigh.

It draws his attention, startles him enough that he flinches on his seat, and he knows Connor must have heard it from the windowsill because he looks back up and his pen pauses on the paper.

He doesn’t look surprised by the text alert, just like it’s caught his attention, although Evan guesses he wouldn’t be. It isn’t like it’s common knowledge amongst his peers that the only text he ever receives are from his mom.

Except, it isn’t a text, Evan realises when he checks his phone more out of a reason to look away from Connor than anything else, and nor is it a notification from Instagram about someone posting for the first time in a while, and nor is it one of the monthly members update email coming in from Ellison Park.

Instead, it’s from google.

From his calendar, oh so helpfully reminding him of the therapy appointment he has in 15 minutes.

Evan knows his eyes widen comically at the sight of it.

Abruptly, he stands, jumping up from the piano stool with such urgency he sends it rocking back on two legs, only staying upright by pure chance. Connor sends him a questioning frown from the windowsill, and the pen moves quickly over his notepad paper as Evan shrugs on his backpack.

‘Somewhere better to be?’

Evan grimaces at the hastily written question, his hands twitching anxiously as he tries to deduce its tone and weighs up his options, internally cursing how hard it is to decipher the feeling behind written words and long it now takes him to communicate. Very briefly, he does consider just flapping a hand and running away, but ultimately decides Connor doesn’t deserve that.

‘Therapy’ he scribbles back by way of explanation, the writing almost illegible from haste and shaking. He supposes that likely answers Connor’s unasked questions too, proves he’s not okay at all, is clearly a fucked up mess of a failure. He knows it will likely end this thing with Connor before it’s even a thing, but he tries not to care.

What he hopes is a friendly sort of smile rather than an anxious, upset, panicked grimace plays on his lips as he passes Connor back his book. He’s turned away by the time Connor’s deciphered his handwriting, but he thinks he just might have caught Connor wearing a look of comprehension that flashes to a small smile of his own as he turns to close the door behind him.

_It was night when Evan woke for the first time and knew he was in the hospital. The lights over his head were dimmed and the room was quiet, but when he fought his vision into some semblance of focus, he found his mom’s blurry figure still sat in the chair at his bedside. She smiled at him when she saw he was awake, her expression sagging with relief when his eyes sluggishly met hers, and her lips were moving as the hand holding his squeezed gently._

_Her smile didn’t last long, quickly giving way to a concerned frown Evan would have hated it if he hadn’t been suddenly much too focused on the fact that not only could he not remember what had happened, he couldn’t find the words he needed to ask. The realisation that he couldn’t hear his mom’s words as she tried to calm him hadn’t helped dispel his panic either._

_He ended up crying, frustrated and confused and in pain, and awkwardly wrapped up in his mom’s arms as she tried her best to provide what little comfort she could to a son who suddenly couldn’t hear and didn’t understand why._

For a reason he doesn’t quite understand, Evan finds himself making his way down to his preferred music room after school the following Monday. It isn’t the piano calling to him back, he doesn’t want to feel the music beneath his fingertips or take his anger out on the keys he can’t really hear. He isn’t quite that angry anymore.

Hopeless, maybe.

Lonely, definitely.

But angry? Mostly at himself.

It’s his fault he’s in this mess after all.

His mom is still working a lot, even more now than she used to before, but he knows she’s only doing it because she has to. They need the money, now so more than ever with his hospital and therapy bills looming over their heads, and she’s still trying to make up the money she lost taking time off in the month after he fell.

He’d been torn at the time, a third guilty and a third angry and a third of him not wanting her to ever leave his side again, but now he kind of wishes she hadn’t taken so much time off. She wouldn’t be working herself to the bone just to keep a roof over their heads and food in their fridge now if she hadn’t.

School has become at least kind of bearable again over the past week, too. He now gets sent the class reading in advance so he knows what they’re learning about before they start, and afterwards, he usually gets a photocopy of the notes of someone else in the class who can add the details spoken out loud to their copy of the notes written of the board.

Evan still makes his own copies during class, but it’s practice and something to do more than anything else.

The music room is empty when Evan opens the door, and he frowns for a second, considering his options, and then enters.

He doesn’t play the piano this time, just sits on the stool before it and fiddles on his phone until the bang of old door mechanism clicking open behind him lifts his head. The noise used to be loud enough to startle him. Now it had only been loud enough for him to hear because he was listening out for it.

Just as he’d hoped, it’s Connor he finds in the doorway when he turns. Like last week, he’s wearing dark clothes and heavy boots and looks almost intimidating in the doorway, but this time there’s a tentative sort of look on his face in place of the twisted one of anger he’d been wearing before.

It looks almost out of place.

He hovers in the doorway, his expression unsure and questioning, with one long finger pointing at the windowsill in a silent, tentative question.

Smiling shyly, Evan nods. This is why he’s come here, after all.

He hadn’t known if Connor would return, had been almost sure he wouldn’t, but he’d been willing to come back and see what happened. The conversation he’d had the week before in the music room, the one made through writing and gestures, had been probably the longest one he’d had with anyone since the middle of 9th grade.

It’s sad, he knows.

Connor settles down against his windowsill, leaning against it this time rather than sitting on it, and then rummages through his bag. He brings out a notebook, the same one he’d had with him the week before, and quickly scribbles a message inside.

‘would you like a lift?’ Evan reads when he turns it around.

He frowns at it, then up at Connor in a way he hopes makes it clear he doesn’t know where he’s being offered a lift to. 

The notebook turns away, and Connor writes. The pen moves rapidly over the paper for much longer than Evan had expected.

‘To therapy? That’s where you went last week and I saw you walking to the bus and I know the bus sucks so I thought you might want a lift.’

Evan draws in a breath, finds himself smiling at the hurriedly scribbled message, but shakes his head all the same.

Behind the mask Connor almost always wears, Evan thinks he looks a little hurt.

He holds up a finger and fishes his phone from his pocket. The calendar is on the screen when holds it up for Connor to see and points at blue blocks of colour scheduled every other Monday afternoon. 

Aside from that and the weekly speech therapy sessions he now has, his calendar is embarrassingly blank. Flushing, he takes back his phone before Connor can really read into the emptiness. It’s bad enough he’s realised Evan’s enough of a mess to warrant seeing a therapist on a regular basis without him knowing he has nothing other than that in his life too.

Well, that and speech therapy, which is clearly going really fucking well since Evan hasn’t said a word to anyone at school since term began. 

He isn’t sure he’s said much at home either, although since there hasn’t really been anyone to talk to there, he kind of lets himself off.

Despite his quick removal of the phone, Evan knows Connor must have seen the emptiness, must have seen the only other events are also labelled therapy, and his cheeks heat. There’s no judgement on his expression when Evan looks up though, just a look of understanding.

Which is actually really ironic, when Evan thinks about it, since he himself doesn’t understand at all. He doesn’t understand a lot of things, but top of that list at the moment, is Connor. It isn’t that he doesn’t want him there, he does, but over the years he’s come to accept he isn’t an interesting person, or a fun person, or a nice person, or a person anyone would want to spend time with. He’s weird, and awkward, and has disgustingly sweaty hands and a stutter. Or he had a stutter, past tense.

Nowadays he doesn’t simply because he can’t even converse properly anymore.

So, long story short, even though there’s a warm sort of buoyancy in his chest that hadn’t been there before and he doesn’t want Connor to go in the slightest, Evan really, really doesn’t understand why he’s still there.

He doesn’t understand why Connor instead of fleeing, pushes himself up on to the windowsill and makes himself comfortable either. 

_A doctor was beside his bed next time he was aware of anything, and although Evan couldn’t understand what he was saying to his mom, couldn’t even hear the words he knew were spilling from his lips, he found he didn’t really care. He felt tired and heavy, lethargic and unbothered in a way he’d blame on sedatives if he had enough motivation to think it through._

_They wheeled him away in his bed soon after, for tests, he thought, and although he could see in their eyes they were worried by the results they eventually got, he was still too out of it to really care. He drifted in and out, struggled to focus even in the moments he was aware, and the events that happened felt more like scattered snapshots than memories in any sort of order. Time passed in a way he couldn’t even begin to comprehend, but he found he didn’t care about that either._

_It wasn’t like he could ask anyone what was happening even if he did care, anyway._

‘You don’t talk anymore?’ Connor writes to him on the fourth Monday as they’re sat together on the ratty carpet of the music room in a comfortable silence, homework on their knees and Connor’s notebook between them. 

The hesitancy with which the book was prodded into his thigh and the soft furrowing of Connor’s light brown brows over his mismatched eyes make Evan sure the question has come from an understandable innocent curiosity rather than anything more callous, but he grimaces at the words all the same.

The truth is he’s meant to be talking, meant to be practising finding his words outside of therapy and keeping in the habit of speech because he’s apparently less likely to forget how if he doesn’t stop, but there are so many drawbacks he just can’t bring himself to do so.

He shrugs instead of answering, shakes his head a little.

Connor frowns too, tilts his head in thought and fixes Evan with a softly questioning sort of stare, and then takes the paper back.

‘you still can though, right?’

Evan sighs at that, rolls his eyes at the question. He taps an ear briefly despite it not actually being his ears that are damaged, and then, after a second, fights a smirk and pointedly taps his nose.

Connor has the decency to flush. It brings a nice colour to his cheeks.

“Sorry,” out loud without thinking, and although Evan can’t hear the word, he can lipread well enough to know what he’d said.

He smiles at that, shakes his head and huffs a forced sort of laugh to let Connor know he isn’t really cross, and then frowns at the paper for a moment. He considers what he’s going to write for much longer than is reasonable.

Connor is patient, first as he thinks and then as he writes, but his eyes still burn curiously as he takes back the book, and Evan watches them as they scan across the page, frowning a little at the messy sentences scrawled in his new, somewhat shaky handwriting.

There’s a different sort of frown on Connor’s lips when he looks up, one very similar to ones Evan has seen before from the doctors and therapists and Jared and his mom and his teachers when they find out what happened to him over the summer. It isn’t quite the same this time though.

Sympathy, Evan thinks, rather than pity.

There’s a difference.

A big one.

The pen pauses in Connor’s hand when he picks it back up, hovering over the paper for longer than it normally does before he starts his reply.

‘I would never judge you for how you speak’ he writes, sending Evan’s stomach swooping, and then, after a nervous smile, he adds ‘I think you’re really brave for coming back here. High school is hell at the best of times, I couldn’t imagine what it’s like for you now.’

 _Brave_ , Evan reads over and over, _Connor thinks he’s brave_ , and he almost scoffs because although what Connor has said is kind, it isn’t true at all. 

In a way, that made sense, Evan realises as he sits there, because what he had written wasn’t the truth either.

Not all of it anyway.

_Evan had to read the note his mom and the doctors had written for him five times on two different occasions to understand enough of it to make some sort of sense of what was happening to him. Half of the difficulty came from his headache and drowsiness and the problem he was having making sense of the written words, but the other half came from denial. He didn’t want what he was reading to be true, it couldn’t be true, so he kept telling himself it wasn’t. He kept telling himself it couldn’t be true until it finally settled that it was._

_He cried when it did, the sobs silent to him but violent enough to send his lungs spasming wetly in his chest and bring medical staff to his room. His mom was there too, her arms wrapping tightly around him, pulling him close until his head rested on her chest, holding him securely as he shook and rubbing her shaking hands over his back as she uttered calming words he could only feel the vibrations of against his pounding head._

Evan’s heart thrummed uncomfortably the entire journey home, and it was still beating faster than was usual as he sat at his desk and tried and failed at his homework. Unease weighed heavy in his chest and sat nauseatingly in his stomach in a way he couldn’t just blame on his anxiety.

It plagued him for long enough that his mom frowned at him when she got home from school, and her lips parted in preparation to ask him a question she then realised he wouldn’t be able to hear. She tapped her head afterwards, her brows furrowing in question, and then rested her hand on his cheek as though to check his temperature when he denied a headache. Shaking his head again, he brushed her away, rolling his eyes at her in a way he hoped she could interpret as that he was feeling fine, and then wrote her back a note saying just that when she asked if anything was up.

It was a lie.

Another one, but one that didn’t leave a guilty lead-like heaviness in his gut like the one to Connor did.

He wasn’t sure why it had landed so badly with him; it wasn’t even a lie, not really.

The scruffily written note he’d passed back had explained the reasons behind his silence, and his new deafness, and why his gait was a little unsteady and his right hand was suddenly more than a little shaky when it wasn’t before. He had told Connor about the swelling in his brain that had kept him unconscious for days, the increase in pressure that had caused the damage, how even the mess he was now was a huge, huge improvement over how he had been those first few days at the hospital. He told Connor how it all happened too, how his broken arm and the head injury that had changed his life had been caused by a fall from the tree during the summer.

And it wasn’t a lie, exactly. He had fallen from a tree.

He just hadn’t fallen in a way that was quite as accidental as people seemed to believe it to be.

_When he calmed down and his mom had gone with a doctor to discuss his prognosis and arrange an army of different therapists, Evan read the note again, and again, and again, forcing his bleary eyes to focus on letters that didn’t form words quite as easily as they used to until an ice-clod numbness replaced the heartbreak and he accepted what it was that he had done._

“I lied,” Evan bursts before he’s even thought it through when Connor opens the door to the music room the following Monday, “A-about what ha-happened to me this summer.” The words grate in his throat, and his voice coming out gravelly and broken with disuse. He isn’t entirely sure how loud he’d spoken either, but he doesn’t think it matters because Connor seems much more caught on the words than the tone they were said in.

Understandably, Connor is frowning, his eyebrows puckered and his eyes hesitant and maybe a little hurt as he instinctively replies out loud in words Evan can’t hear, but he doesn’t push him or leave so it could have been worse.

Evan thinks he can probably get the gist of what Connor asked even though he missed the actual words, too. He knows what he’d be asking if he was in Connor’s position anyway.

“W-well, kind of, anyway, I d-didn’t… didn’t... It w-wasn’t all a … um, it was- was mostly true,” he explains in broken, jumbled sort of sentences before Connor can say or do anything else. It’s a fight to find the words, a struggle to find replacements for the ones he’s truly lost too, and he’s so stressed by his urgent and unexpected admission that his recently underused tongue trips over the words. “I-I do um… h-have a brain… brain… um, I d-did hurt my head w-when I fell, but, um, I d-didn’t fall, I didn’t- it wasn’t an a-a… um– um, I- I let… I let go.”

His words are quite by the end, or at least he thinks they are. They’re whispered wetly and followed by a wheezy, wet sort of inhale that’s more sob than not. His eyes are wide too, and his breathing is choppy with panic not just because that’s the first time Evan has told anyone that, but because he told Connor.

Not his mom, or his doctors, or his therapists. They know the lie. The half-truth, at best.

But Connor, Evan doesn’t even know why he’s told Connor, it just sort of happened, the lie that had eaten him up all week unlocking the box in the cave in the deepest darkest corner of his mind where he had hidden that secret, and a trust born of something he doesn’t understand opening his heart and spilling it all to a boy he’s only really known for four weeks. Or four days, depending on how he’s counting. Well, four hours, really.

He expects Connor to run, to ask him if it’s some sick sort of joke or something like that, but he doesn’t. Instead he blinks and frowns as though processing what he’s just heard, and then goes a greyish sort of pale that makes Evan very worried he’s going to either pass out or throw up because he’s not capable of dealing with either of those things right now.

Eventually, after a long time that in reality has probably only been seconds, Connor’s frozen expression slips, falls like it had before.

It isn’t pity or sympathy on his lips this time. It’s something Evan eventually realises is understanding. 

Empathy, not sympathy.

There’s a difference there too.

A colossal one.

Evan draws in a shuddering breath.

He isn’t sure what to do with the information he has just accidentally uncovered, but he thinks he finally understands why he’s used his first words in months to blurt his darkest secret to a boy he doesn’t really know.

He hates that he’s done it, in a way, and he hates what he tried and failed to do in the forest, and he hates that he failed, and he hates that Connor seems to have gone through all of that too, but very suddenly, there’s a warmth in him that there wasn’t before. There’s a glimmer of hope amongst the darkness, because although nothing is really any better than it was that morning, at least he now knows isn’t alone.

Suddenly weak, Evan sags, breathes a shaky, wet sort of breath, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, allows himself to be pulled into the most unexpected hug he thinks he’s ever had.

Late summer turns to autumn turns to winter, the weeks passing by faster than Evan expects them to. School and therapy and homework keep him busy and his mom keeps him motivated, but he finds it’s Connor who keeps him happy. They see each other most days now, spending the journey to school and back again together in Connor’s car, working side by side during their study periods, and eating lunch hunched over Connor’s notebook in the music rooms.

Connor tries teaching Evan at draw one lazy afternoon after school, not caring that his hand still shakes a little or that his eye for perspective isn’t great.

It doesn’t take Evan long to notice that Connor smiles more and more during the hours they spend together, but it does take him a while to realise that he finds himself smiling more too. Something warms inside him when he realises that he’s smiling more than he ever thought he could again, even before he woke up from the fall and realised what had happened.

Other things change for the better too.

Connor starts seeing a therapist, for a start, something Evan helps him work out how to bring up to his parents, and in return, Connor helps him tell his mom what actually happened in the forest over the summer.

His mom cried when he’d told her, and then Evan had been crying too, but it had cracked a wall that had slowly been building between them. They’d spent the evening together on the sofa afterwards, both teary eyed, the notebook between them salt stained and water wrinkled and the pencil smudged, but the evening of emotion and upset left a calmness in its wake, like the quiet after a storm.

After that, Evan’s therapy sessions had increased, and his meds had eventually been changed, and although neither of those things had actually fixed the mess that was his brain, he thinks it might have helped. He stops wishing he had climbed a little higher, fallen a little harder, that his brain had bled a little faster with quite so much conviction, and he stops thinking of himself quite so often of a useless, broken burden who could disappear and leave behind no one who cared.

Things still aren’t perfect; there are still days when his shitshow of a brain refuses to cooperate and he can barely find the motivation to leave his bed, but he’s making progress, and he can see so. 

Physically, he’s making progress too. He still gets headaches, still has strong pain meds in his backpack for when they hit, but they’re getting fewer and further between as the months go by. His balance is back to how it used to be, his right leg no longer weaker than the other, and although his hand still shakes a little when he’s tired or stressed, he no longer has a problem with its strength or coordination.

The aphasia hasn’t gone away, not entirely, and he still sometimes find himself stressing over words he knows exist but cannot remember or swapping parts of his sentences into weird orders, but it’s better than it was.

Most of that is due to practice, he knows, with his therapist, and his mom, and, eventually, with Connor.

True to his word, Connor never judges him for how he speaks. He never gives Evan that look of pity Jared had that day, never interrupts with words offered in help until he knows Evan is ready. And sometimes Evan does need help, he accepts that now.

Accepts that he might need help finding what it is he wants to say, or with tasks his hand isn’t yet steady enough to do, or with walking on those occasions when a blinding headache hits him with a vengeance and steals his balance. He accepts that this is how his life is now, accepts that it’s how it might always be.

He’s still angry, at himself, at the world, but he accepts it.

He accepts that although his hearing is improving, has improved enough that in the quiet of a room, he can just about hear the warming ring of Connor’s laughter, it’s very likely never going to return to how it was before, too.

It might get better than it is now, there might be a time when he can hear clarity in music and his mom’s voice and Connor’s amusement, but it might not. He might never hear those things, any things, properly again, and although he’s sad about that, about what he’s lost, he finds that what he’s got in its place, is, for the moment at least, enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> P.S. Comments are loved :)


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